Gyan Bharatam Portal
Why in News?
The Ministry of Culture informed the Lok Sabha that the Gyan Bharatam Portal now hosts digital records of over 88,800 manuscripts from across India, highlighting rapid progress in the national manuscript digitisation mission.
Administrative Framework
- Nodal Ministry: Managed entirely by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
- Origin: Developed as the primary digital wing of the Gyan Bharatam Mission, which was announced in the Union Budget 2025-26.
- Financial Outlay: Supported by a sanctioned budget of ₹491.66 crore spanning the period from 2025 to 2031.
- Institutional Network: Implemented via a pan-India network of 45 onboarded centers (including 19 Cluster Centers and 12 Independent Centers) across 20 States and Union Territories.
- AI & Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR): Tools designed to decipher, read, and translate complex ancient texts automatically.
- Blockchain Integration: Employed to systematically track the provenance, history, and verification records of precious artifacts.
- Massive Archiving: Aiming to survey, document, and conserve over one crore (10 million) manuscripts scattered across private homes, temples, libraries, and monasteries.
- National Repository: To build a centralized National Digital Repository (NDR) making traditional Indian knowledge globally accessible to scholars, researchers, and students.
- Public Participation: Empowering common citizens and custodians to voluntarily upload manuscript information using the dedicated mobile app without changing original text ownership.
The portal and mission operate across five structured functional areas:
- Survey & Cataloguing: Building local, state, and national inventories.
- Conservation & Capacity Building: Setting up labs and training grassroots volunteers (Pandulipi Mitras).
- Technology & Digitization: Implementing high-quality optical character recognition (OCR) and imaging standards.
- Linguistics & Translation: Modernizing ancient scripts for contemporary research.
- Research, Publication & Outreach: Fostering educational modules and immersive VR/AR experiences for public engagement.
